So, remember when we moved Eleanor into her new toddler bed? At the time I wrote about how she was doing a great job and going right to bed without getting up and that we thought it was funny that she wouldn’t leave her room after she woke up in the morning until we came to get her. Well, the honeymoon is over!

Just as my mom friends predicted, the novelty of the big girl bed has worn off. She now walks right out to find us when she gets up in the morning or after a nap and getting her to sleep is not going so great! Saturday night she just did not want to go to bed. We walked her back to bed every 3-5 minutes for about 4-and-a-half hours. We finally got to sleep around 1am! And guess who decided that she’d wake up super early the next day! Yup, that little Monster (don’t worry she takes that as a compliment, Monsters, Inc. is her very favorite movie right now) got us up at 6am the next day! So we were all running on about 5 hours of sleep on Sunday.

She also wouldn’t nap on Sunday. After putting her back in bed for about an hour, she finally stayed there. But she came out only an hour later (she always naps for at least two hours) looking very tired, which led us to believe that she hadn’t napped at all. We didn’t have too much trouble putting her to bed that night. We only had to put her back in bed 5 times before she finally stayed there. I assume she was as exhausted as we were from the lack of sleep the night before and no nap that day!

Today (Monday) she only got out of bed twice at nap time. But as I write this I’ve been putting her back into bed for the last hour and a half. I think she’s finally gone to sleep though. It’s been about 20 minutes since she last got up. I think that I did a better job tonight than we did the first night. We know that the trick is to consistently and dispassionately walk your darling Monster back to bed without saying a word or making eye contact. It’s pretty tough when you have to keep it up for four hours! We did not do a great job that first night. We mostly did what we were supposed to but sometimes we listened and responded to her complaints because she is a little sick and we felt bad about that, although I don’t really think that was what was keeping her up. And we were also exhausted and I was feeling pretty sick myself and just did not have the energy or patience necessary.

Tonight I did a much better job and walked her back without a word, over and over again. Although, I did have to interact with her a little when at one trip back to bed she showed me that she had taken her diaper off and put it in the hamper. But she’s finally asleep (I hope)!

My favorite baby sleep book, Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child, claims that it should take about 3-4 nights of silently walking them back to bed to solve the problem. To that I say, “you have obviously not met Eleanor, who has the endurance of a triathlete and the stubbornness of her mother (super, super stubborn).”